Last week was Global Entrepreneurship week. And because I live and breathe entrepreneurship, it only made sense that 2 out of the 3 Zoom talks I gave were on the subject.
"Criticize by Creating" - The entrepreneur's mindset
The Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEE) had its 4-Day Entrepreneur Week webinar series.
The ever so inspiring T-K Coleman, of the Revolution of One, kicked-off the week and series with our panel on Monday.
On the last day, I came back giving a TED style talk on “How to follow your dreams during a crisis”, sharing my story on overcoming adversity, finding motivation during trying times, and how I used my skills and expertise to try to change lives and solve problems. I shared how the pandemic had challenged Skin is Skin, and what we did to adapt to the changes.
More than 1, 200 high school students had registered to attend and from their many questions, you could tell that this new generation is into taking matter and their journey into their own hands. Love it!
In the end we hope everyone walked away understanding that it is important to think creatively and entrepreneurially. The only permanence of life is change. The best way to face change is to think outside of the box, with a can-do attitude. One should never underestimate the power of self-agency and the importance of personal responsibility.
Love, Curiosity, Empathy for a Better World for All
Later in the week, on Thursday morning, I joined Kearney for their ELEVATE X Black@Kearney Learning Café Series, event aims to provide global Kearney employees and guests, as the leaders of tomorrow, with the opportunity to build more diverse networks.
My cafe talk was titled "Love, Curiosity, Empathy for a Better World for All", as we all know at Skin is Skin.
Indeed, we all have biases. Based on the best scientific research, the way to transcend our biases is through love, curiosity, and empathy. SkinIsSkin has developed a five step program with exercises that empowers each of us to transcend our biases. Our approach is a completely positive, constructive approach to addressing the issue of racial bias that is more effective because it is based on state-of-the-art research on how our brain processes the world.
At the end of the event and as we all gathered back to compare notes from the four Café talks, one of the speakers proceeded to share the 3 things she deemed to be critical to a good "Diversity , Equity & Inclusion program":
1/ Make sure to include white men.
2/ Measure, measure, measure, because you can't solve what you can't measure
3/ Be sure to have the buy-in from top management to shepherd the effort
From everything we know about the science of bias, I of course could not disagree more and told her why those 3 points were wrong from our standpoint:
1/ White men, green women, purple unicorns.... how about just the good old "let's include everyone"?
2/ Forget about the metrics because it’s hard to measure re-wiring, empathy and tiny acts of change
3/ It is not about a top down approach, but very much about a bottom up approach. It is best to look for team members who genuinely want to embark on this journey, make it their baby and proceed from there to grow the efforts within their department and the rest of the company.
